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CHAPEL HILL – The task facing North Carolina on Saturday in its western mountains is difficult enough given that Appalachian State will be lying in wait ready to slay the disliked baby blues from the flagship.

The Tar Heels have never played at App State in football, and with the school bringing in 10,000 additional seats, the occasion will serve as an event as much as a highly contested and physical football game. The latter two are certainly expectations.

But for UNC, the game isn’t inside the friendly confines of Kenan Stadium, where Mack Brown’s team dispatched FCS member Florida A&M this past weekend 56-24 improving its record to 15-4 at home since Brown returned following the 2018 campaign.

Playing away from Chapel Hill has rendered different results, though. Carolina is 6-13 overall in such games in the Brown Part II era, including 4-11 in true road games, which will be the case Saturday at Kidd Brewer Stadium.

The Tar Heels need a road win, and they know it.

“I want us to get back to where we were when we left here,” Brown said Monday, alluding to UNC’s consecutive top-10 seasons before he left for Texas in 1997. “We can, and we’ve got everything headed in the right direction, we’ve just got to start winning on the road. And that’s why this game… We need to win on the road.”

This game is the App game, and while the oddsmakers see it as a toss-up, or even a slight edge to the home team, for North Carolina to truly be what North Carolina can, this borders in the must-win realm.

Consider that Carolina lost to App State at home in 2019 by three points, so if the Heels fall again to the Mountaineers, that means Brown’s rebuilding project will include an 0-2 mark against an in-state program that didn’t join the FBS until 2014, a year after Brown stepped down at Texas.

But more than that, actually significantly more than that, North Carolina simply must notch a win in someone else’s house. It hasn’t defeated anyone away from Chapel Hill since a historic 62-26 rout of Miami at Hard Rock Stadium on December 12, 2020. That will be 630 days ago by kickoff.

In the span since, UNC 0-for its last seven games away from its campus. The stretch began with the Orange Bowl loss to Texas A&M on a night the Heels quitted themselves quite well.

One was the opener at Virginia Tech last season in which Brown recently described his ballyhooed offense’s performance as “atrocious,” and three weeks later, Carolina was wrecked by Georgia Tech in what was the low performance of Brown’s second stint.

The first Tech later fired its coach (Justin Fuente), and the second Tech’s coach (Geoff Collins) entered this season on the hottest of hot seats. There were competitive losses at Notre Dame and Pittsburgh, the meltdown at NC State, and the complete no-show in Charlotte versus South Carolina.

That was last season, graduate defensive lineman Ray Vohasek said. Though, the Tar Heels may have learned something from those setbacks.

“It’s a new year and a new team,” he said Wednesday at the Kenan Football Center. “That’s something we really struggled at last year winning on the road. It really just comes down to preparation and handling that adversity when adversity hits, and adversity is going to hit in every football game.

“And on the road, it can be amplified with the crowd.”

The Heels are out of town again the following weekend visiting Georgia State. So, the task to get going is difficult, but they are also presented opportunities to change the road-weary narrative to a road-warrior-ish one.

That begins at high noon on The Rock.

“Our goal is to be confident and not let the environment get too big,” UNC redshirt freshman quarterback Drake Maye said. “So, starting out with this game at App, getting a road win would be huge for the rest of the season. Treat it like another game and know it can set us up along the way for the season.”

As Brown said, they can’t reach their goals without winning on the road, and that quest begins Saturday.